Brett Berk

Now that your kid is safely back in school, the Gay Uncle can tell you the story of a summer camp from hell. Don’t worry, it’s not the one that Jason Voorhees haunted in the 47 Friday the 13th movies, so no one gets a knife stuffed through their chest or has their limbs cut off by a powerboat motor. No, this camp was run by a Hassidic sect up here in the Catskills for roughly 300 kids, at a rundown old resort community which had seen better days when it went out of business in 1981. But did these folks spruce it up? Give it a fresh coat of paint? At least patch the leaky roofs? Nah. Then it wouldn’t be camp! More importantly, they didn’t even bother to obtain the proper county or state permits to run a children’s summer getaway, so when a heating oil spill (!) in mid-July brought the camp to the attention of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, other regulators started poking around. What did they find? Nothing much. Just the usual minor violations like water running over electrical boxes, broken fire extinguishers and windows, and what they called “pervasive mold”. (In fact, when they arrived, many of the campers were apparently wearing white surgical masks while engaged in their activities, in order to foster this little thing called “breathing”). When they moved to shut the camp down, they ended up in a Ruby Ridge-like standoff, in which the directors refused to leave or send the kids home. “Their parents are on vacation!” they told authorities. “Where would you like them to go?” So the little cuties had to spend a couple more days in Dirty Camp. Gunc hopes they have no lasting damage. He also wonders if he could send a few of his nieces there next year, once they fix the whole rotting walls and carpets full of spores issue. It’s close by, and he could sneak snacks in to them through the cyclone fence.

This week in his Momlogic column, the Gay Uncle exposes a source of some parents’ secret Back to School blues: Dealing with preschoolers who DON’T cry when they say goodbye. Check it out.

Vindicated again! The Gay Uncle read this morning that the new issue of Child Development is reporting the findings of a rigorous scientific study that found that babies who are allowed to cry it out at night slept much better than babies who are rushed to at the first sign of tears. He’s been advocating this method for twenty years (and lays out and justifies a kind, straightforward, and extremely actionable plan for implementing just such a system in his book) and is glad to see that some real research is helping to make the point. Still, if you’re one of those moms or dads who runs toward their baby as if it’s on fire every time it lets out a whimper, he’s not saying you’re a bad person. He’s just saying you’re a bad parent.

Continuing with today’s Gunc inundation, the G.U. also has a new piece up on Momlogic, about the sad demise of the stellar kids’ TV program Reading Rainbow. Check it out HERE.

The Gay Uncle makes a triumphant return to the stellar parenting mag Babble, with a piece that uses his decade of market research experience for the powers of good: providing 5 actionable tips for teaching your young child how to be a more critical navigator of the world of commercial messages. Click fast before Kellogg’s, Disney, and Bakugan colonize their brains! Here’s the link.

Do contemporary parents truly have no shame? It appears that the answer is a resounding, Yes! Witness, a recent report about how groups of them are trying to ban the one true harbinger of summer (now that we don’t have warm weather, sun, or swimmable beaches): the ice cream truck. Why do they want to rid our nation’s parks, playgrounds, and residential streets of this white enamel-clad menace? Because they think that they are “vultures” preying on their innocent children’s desires for a treat. Because they believe that they’re modern day pied pipers leading their tender offspring down the road to ruin with their menacing tinkling bell song. Because they believe that ice cream is fatty and unhealthy. But mostly because they are apparently INCAPABLE OF SIMPLY SAYING NO to their kids and meaning it. Yes, ice cream may not be health food, and the tune the trucks play can be maddening, and kids might want a frozen confection more often than you want to give it to them. But the job of being a parent is not to project all of the travails and challenges of raising a child outward, expecting the world to morph and conform to your needs. The job is to create rational and safe limits for your kid, and to stick with them, so that they learn to understand how life works. Attempting to ban the ice cream truck for circling the park is like getting angry at the swingset for your kid wanting to ride on it at bedtime. The solution is the same: make a rule, implement it, and expect your kid to conform. They might fuss or even–god forbid–cry. But the Gay Uncle guarantees that they’ll get it. And everyone will be happier.

Here’s yet another way for the Gay Uncle to combine his two core interests: Kids and Cars! When he’s not busy writing the National Magazine Award winning column Noise Vibration and Harshness for Gunc’s second-favorite automotive magazine, Automobile, friend of the Uncle–and fellow car mensch–Jamie Kitman manages a little outfit called They Might Be Giants. You might have heard of them? Anyway, the Giants have a new video out from their upcoming kids album “Here Comes the Science” (out 09/01) all about more carbon neutral forms of motorized transport. It’s called “Electric Car”, and while the vehicle featured in it isn’t nearly as sexy as the G.U.’s current voltage favorite the Tesla Roadster, it seems to be able to go anywhere on land or sea, like an Amphicar, and magically morph in size. Also, there are some Busby Berkeley-style choreography sequences. And it’s cute as shit.

So what are you waiting for? Watch it right now by CLICKING HERE.

No, this is not the name of a little-known John Hughes movie. It’s a true story, and a response to the content of the Gay Uncle’s new article in COOKIE about choosing a pre-school for your child. One regular reader noted that the mom in the piece lived in a city that wasn’t so competitive in terms of early childhood admissions practices, and asked the G.U., “What if you don’t have a choice of schools?” Living in a town with only three options–one of which was too far away for her nanny (who didn’t drive), one of which hung up on her when she called to ask about the length of the waiting list, and one of which was affiliated with a church to which she did not belong (because she was Jewish)–this mom chose the path of least spiritual resistance, and joined the Methodists. How did this play out? Well, she simply started attending Sunday services with her kids. She hit up a midnight Mass on Christmas. (“They know you’re a Je-ew. They’re all looking at yo-ou,” her husband sang, inventing his own lyrics to O’ Come All Ye Faithful.) And she began teaching religious school to the early elementary grades. “I kind of did my own take,” she told the G.U. “I rooted for Moses. And I didn’t do so well on the pretending that Jesus was the savior part either. Then, when I talked to the pastor and he mentioned the church’s preschool, I acted all surprised. ‘Well, what a coincidence. I’m looking for a school for my older daughter.'” How long did this charade last? “Well, the girls are three years apart and preschool is for three years, so…eight years, I guess?” Is this fair? Faithful? What is the moral to this story? The Gay Uncle thinks it’s something like, God Cheats, Why Shouldn’t You?

This time in the summer, no one wants to think about the fall. No one, that is, except The Gay Uncle, who has a piece out in this month’s COOKIE, all about how to select a preschool for your precious darling. Click here and learn how one mom found out what to look for.

As a professional advocate for young children, The Gay Uncle has often been a bit”¦startled at the way that little Bobby Draper””the son of adman Don and anomic housewife Betty on the AMC program Mad Men””has been treated. In Season 1, he was smacked across his juice-stained face by a total stranger for running around inside the house. In Season 2, his mom campaigned hard for him to be spanked, hard, after he allegedly broke the family record player. (Aiming for redemption from his own brutal boyhood beatings, Don chose instead to smash his son”s toy robot against the kitchen wall and give his wife a shove.) In his heart, Gunc can forgive the show for this brutality because he knows that that a) these displays are meant to shock us by demonstrating the archaic child rearing practices of the Jet Set era, b) according to the end-credit disclaimer, No real children were injured in the making of this program, and c) as a parenting guru, he often wishes that contemporary parents assumed the tiniest iota of Don and Betty”s “authority”¯ instead of pretending that their kid is their best friend or equal (to adverse effect for all). Plus it”s not like the Draper”s daughter, Sally, fares much better, getting shamed, locked in a closet, and having her arm twisted, not to mention nearly suffocating in her mom”s dry-cleaning bag.

But, in the premiere episode of Season 3, Mad Men crossed a line. Unlike many other viewers, the G.U. looks forward to the bits of the show that feature the younger Drapers, and waited expectantly for the little buggers to appear. But when they finally did in the episode”s final minutes, he was rendered speechless. There, hoisting a giant suitcase onto the foot of Don and Betty”s bed, was a child who was obviously meant to be Bobby. But he looked”¦different. At first, Gunc suspected that the kid had simply aged, the way that Tina Yothers””Michael J. Fox”s “little”¯ sister from Family Ties””had grown about eleven inches and put on forty pounds in the show”s final years. But in squinting at the screen, he quickly discarded this notion. “They replaced Bobby!”¯ he shouted to his boyfriend, who was too busy hoping Don would get undressed for bed to notice. Gunc punched his partner’s leg. “It”s a different f*%king Bobby. It”s a different kid.”¯ Tal simply shrugged.

The actor had only been on screen for a moment””devious Matt Weiner was clearly trying to ease us in with a classic bait and switch. But a quick jump over to IMDB proved the Gay Uncle correct. The frightened, and mildly anemic looking “Classic”¯ Bobby played by Aaron Hart””veteran of two seasons of Mad Men as well as 52 (!!) episodes of Guiding Light””had been excised, and replaced by a round cheeked imposter named Jared Gilmore. Gunc felt like that mother in Massachusetts who, on clicking on some scammy online adoption site, found a picture of her own son being offered up as a “cute Canadian boy”¯ living in an orphanage in Cameroon. According to his database listing, little Aaron has moved on to other things””an upcoming episode of Ghost Whisperer most prominent among them. Perhaps he grew depressed by Mad Men”s depiction of emptiness at the soul of the American family. Perhaps he became befuddled by his dual 1960s/2000s lives, confused as to whether a daily breakfast of fried eggs and bacon would cause him to grow up and become a big strong man, or put him in his grave before sprouting his first pubic hair. Perhaps he simply got tired of being smacked around. Whatever the cause of his departure, The Gay Uncle wants to go on the record as saying: he noticed. In the immortal words of Angelina Jolie: “This is not my son.”¯ Jared Gilmore, you devious little changeling, Gunc is watching you.